The School of Information is UC Berkeley’s newest professional school. Located in the center of campus, the I School is a graduate research and education community committed to expanding access to information and to improving its usability, reliability, and credibility while preserving security and privacy.

The School of Information's courses bridge the disciplines of information and computer science, design, social sciences, management, law, and policy. We welcome interest in our graduate-level Information classes from current UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students and community members. More information about signing up for classes.

FlexCheck

For years, consumer technology has been able to measure steps, heart rate, running cadence, sleep quality, and more. But these metrics only offer a limited view of well being. So far, there’s been no easy way to measure flexibility or range of motion. But if we want to perform better and recover faster, we need to start quantifying our flexibility.

Part of the challenge of improving your flexibility is that it's hard to measure. You might know how many pushups you can do, or how much weight you can bench press, but how are you quantifying the flexibility of your shoulders? Knowing the exact limits of your range of motion could help you prevent injuries and motivate recovery from injuries.

But if you’re paying out of pocket, it’s prohibitively expensive and time consuming to quantify your mobility. If you aren’t a professional athlete, or covered by insurance while recovering from an injury, your options are limited. You can take a test like the Functional Movement Screen, but such tests have to be administered by a certified physical trainer, often at $100 per hour or more. Just to check your progress once a month, you’ll easily spend over $1,000 a year, on top of hours of extra driving time. This isn’t feasible for most people, and as a consequence, they don’t know if their mobility routines are working, and they don’t have metrics to show definite progress.

Applications exist today that can somewhat quantify your mobility, but they either rely on manual data entry, have limited functionality, or require specialized equipment. FlexCheck changes the paradigm in that it only requires an image of the user, which can be uploaded from any computer or mobile device. FlexCheck takes advantage of deep learning technology and the latest advances in computer vision to identify key body parts and calculate the relevant angles for a huge number of positions.